THROUGH HER EYES
A Five-film Series by Italian Women Directors
Wednesday, March 18 | 6:30 PM (doors open at 6 PM)
Italian Cultural Institute
710 Sansome Street, San Francisco
DISCOVERY AT DAWN (La scoperta dell’alba)
Dir: Susanna Nicchiarelli
Italy, 2013, 92 min
With Margherita Buy, Sergio Rubini, Susanna Nicchiarelli, Lina Sastri
In Italian with English subtitles
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SYNOPSIS
Rome, 1981: with seven shots from a revolver, two members of the Red Brigade gun down Professor Mario Tessandori in the university courtyard, in plain sight. He dies in the arms of his friend and colleague Lucio Astengo. A few weeks later, Lucio Astengo himself disappears.
It is now 2011. Caterina and Barbara Astengo, who were six and twelve years old when their father died, have put their family’s beach home – now abandoned for some time – up for sale. The house is full of memories of a childhood interrupted by their father’s disappearance, of a family broken and never put back together. In one corner, a 1970srotary dial telephone is still plugged in to the wall, though has been disconnected for years. Caterina feeling nostalgic at the sight of the old phone, lifts the receiver and inexplicably hears a dial tone. She tries dialing a few numbers, but the phone remains silent. Then, almost as a game, she tries the number of their home in the city thirty years earlier. This time, she hears ringing: a child’s voice answers. It is herself, twelve years old, one week before her father’s disappearance. Fate has given her a second chance: if not to save her father, then at least to discover the truth.